The latest hair-raising data point comes courtesy of Fusion, which reports that Facebook is using your location data to help find nearby people who could potentially be your friend. These people are shown to you in the “People You May Know” section on Facebook. According to Fusion, a man who attended an event for suicidal teens checked his Facebook the day after the meeting only to find one of the anonymous parents from the event had shown up in his “People You May Know.”

The two hadn’t exchanged contact information or even names, and their only connection seemed to be a shared G.P.S. data point. This wasn’t just a coincidence—Facebook confirmed that it uses your location data to show you friend suggestions. The platform insists, though, that there needs to be another factor before it shows you a suggested friend—a shared location point alone isn’t enough. “People You May Know are people on Facebook that you might know,” a Facebook spokesperson told Fusion, in a rather glib statement. “We show you people based on mutual friends, work and education information, networks you’re part of, contacts you’ve imported and many other factors.” (Update: On Tuesday, Facebook completely reversed its position from that initial statement, telling Fusion that after some digging, the company had determined that “we’re not using location data, such as device location and location information you add to your profile, to suggest people you may know”—despite ample anecdotal evidence to the contrary.)

This doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, since Facebook relies on user location data for a number of features. Earlier this month, Facebook unveiled a new way to track the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on its platforms: brick-and-mortar retailers who advertise on Facebook are now able to include an interactive map with details about their physical store locations to help users find them in person. If Facebook users actually visit the store, Facebook uses its users’ phone-location services to figure out how many people who saw an ad for a specific store ended up visiting it. Advertisers see the data, too. But there are circumstances in which people may not want to reveal their identity, and may inadvertently have their phones on in places like addiction-recovery groups, for example, or in the hospital. For people who rely on webs of anonymity to feel safe, having Facebook suggest them to others based on shared location data might feel like a violation of privacy, even if you tacitly agreed to it within Facebook’s terms of service. The smallest bit of solace: Facebook lets users opt out of location sharing inside the privacy settings in its app.